


garden

by anonymity



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare, Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Genre: Afterlife, Canon-Typical Violence, Everyone is Dead, For both Hamlet and TEWWG really, Gen, Implied/Referenced Aromantic Character, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mentions of Drowning, and this fic doesn't add to that debate, but it does have some, insofar as Ophelia actually committed suicide, kind of?, there's a debate as to wether or not that's true, there's no overt gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 07:30:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18383810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymity/pseuds/anonymity
Summary: one of them is fire and edges, and the other one is earth and sunlight(guess which is which)





	garden

**Author's Note:**

> I'm... trying out these border image things. I might come back to this in a few days and take them out? We'll see.

1.  
Mostly, things are unextraordinary and unchanging. On Wednesday she wears jeans and no makeup to school. She lives in a house and is comfortable. That’s all.

 

2.  
She feels it like a crescendo- an exact texture on the inward facing side of her stomach tissue, and nothing has changed in the room but she feels it. She hums softly and taps the table and the boy sitting next to her asks her to stop. She sets the classroom on fire, and then tears out her fingernails.

 

3.  
She weighs heaven against her own agency, because those are the only two parts she knows.  
“Eternity is a scam,” she says, and sets her house on fire.  
She imagines a boy in front of her telling her he is in love with her and she sets him on fire, too, but she doesn’t like that part as much so she changes her mind and drowns him instead.

 

4.  
She thinks, maybe, she is made of fire.  
“You are not,” says the boy.  
“Who are you?” she says, and his words tangle uncomfortable wrong in her mouth.  
“Him,” the boy says, “the important one.”  
Here, she thinks of her father, her brother, her boyfriend, and-  
“None of them were important,” she says.  
He knows she is made of fire, so he pushes her out of the tree and into the river and she drowns.

 

5.  
The thing she holds the tightest is her name- Ophelia, in her own handwriting. It does not pull her above water but it is old, old words and it is hers.

 

6.  
Is this who she is?

 

 

_who you are is for you to decide_  


1.  
(and after everything)  
(she is not here to be overwhelmed again)

So she stands up and puts her hands out and says “this is my house.”

And she opens her eyes and she is in her own house that she knows so intimately and she is steady on her own two feet.  
“That’s better,” she nods, and straightens her jacket. “You stay like that, now. I ain’t in the mood for no bullshit today.”

 

2.  
First, she writes her name. Janie, in her own handwriting, and she hangs a sign out on the front porch. Then she has to go and re organize her home because it’s- well, it’s exactly how it was when she was alive, and she thinks it’s probably time for a change.  
The first time someone knocks at her door, it’s an older woman- greying hair and textured skin, but maybe too young to be here. Janie invites her in and the woman says her name is Alice.  
Alice says, “I don’t know where I am,” and Janie says, “You don’t give yourself enough credit,” and Alice says “Never thought I’d want to be wrong so badly.” She leaves, and Janie doesn’t really care where she goes.  
Janie looks back on the memory of her first visitor fondly. She has more, later.

 

3.  
Janie looks out across the grasslands, and sees a car in the distance. Is there a road there? She wonders, and decides not to go look. There are flowers in the grass, and a single pear tree just outside of Janie’s porch that casts dappled shadows across the front of her house. Janie has never seen a sun in this place.

 

4.  
Once, Janie sits out on her front porch, sipping idly at the sunlight, and wonders why she hasn’t left this place yet. There is a road, she thinks. I could go wherever I want. She doesn’t know how she knows that, but she knows it’s true, and she thinks maybe that’s why she hasn’t left?  
It’s probably more that she’s just happy here, she decides.  
“I am happy here,” she says outloud, and it tumbles wild free through her hair, loose across her shoulders.

_you are only made of glass if you want to be_

This is the important part.  
Ophelia wakes face up on an empty concrete road, grassland littered with wildflowers extending on both sides for as far as she can see.  
She stands up, and there is a house in the distance. A woman stands on the front porch, and her hair shifts slightly as by wind even though the air around Ophelia is heavy-settled. Ophelia stumbles, slightly, and the woman catches her, and Ophelia realizes suddenly that she is standing on the porch and the road and the grass and the flowers are all behind her.

 

 _This is the important part._  
The woman stumbles her way through the grass, up on to the porch and Janie catches her before her knees hit the weathered wood.  
“Am- am I in one piece?” the woman stutters, leans herself back to her own feet, and Janie laughs outright, because that wasn’t quite what she’d expected.  
“I can’t help you with that part,” she starts, and the woman looks dazed. “Why don’t you come on inside? Seems like you’d like a place to sit.”  
The woman says, “I’m Ophelia,” and Janie says “and I’m Janie,” and opens the front door. 

 

 _This, because..._  
“Have you ever been in love?” Ophelia asks over the coffee table with a desperation that Janie recognizes out of “please, are we really dead?”  
“A few times,” Janie says, because responding to desperation with the truth has worked for her so far. “...Have you?”  
Ophelia grips her cup. “A boy told me he was in love with me,” she says, which isn’t an answer.  
“I’m sorry,” says Janie, the sincerity of her voice offset by the mischief in her eyes and Ophelia laughs herself back into one piece.

 

 _Because, because, because:_  
Ophelia learns that Janie is made of wood and earth and Janie learns that Ophelia is made of fire and glass.  
Janie asks one day, “you going to stay?” and Ophelia says, “there’s a road out there.”  
Janie says, “I know.”  
Ophelia says, “I’m going hunting for seaglass,” and spends hours beachcoming through grasslands. She comes back with a hundred shards of glass cupped in her hands and a flower in her hair. Janie takes the flower, and Ophelia melts the glass into her own skin.

A car rumbles down the road, and the flowers shift in the wind. Neither of them look.

**Author's Note:**

> So Ophelia in this fic is aromantic, but this was written for a school assignment and there was a word cap so I couldn't really get into that as much as I wanted to. Just know that a lot of the feelings that went into her sections of the story came from my own aro experiences.  
> (There's also that kind of throwaway bit where she's asking Janie 'have you ever been in love'? And Janie thinks it sounds really desperate? And then Janie asks her if she's ever been in love and she straight up doesn't answer the question? Yeah.)


End file.
